Industry News

Google Ads, as we covered earlier, made changes to Target CPA & Target ROAS. But now, Google sent out an email about even more changes starting on August 17, 2026 around bidding for campaigns limited by budget. It seems like this bidding update will end up costing advertisers even more money.

Here is the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I summarize the major organic Google Search news and SEO topics from the past month. The big news was the Google June 2026 spam update, which took only two days to roll out and felt like it started earlier and was substantial.

If you take a look at the Bing Webmaster Tools newish AI performance reports, you may see more data, impressions, etc showing up on and after June 1, 2026. Microsoft said this is just "regular data backfilling" and there are "no anomalies" (which I think is a dig at Google).

Google has reportedly updated the Google Ads "All Campaigns" drop-down selection box to be from the center of the screen to the top-left corner and added the full campaign hierarchy in an expandable view.

Google updated how it handles sending searchers to AMP pages within Google Search. Now Google will send searchers directly to publisher-hosted AMP pages instead of the cached pages displayed in an AMP viewer. Google said this was done because it "simplifies and reduces maintenance efforts for publishers who are creating AMP content."

Google has now added an unsubscribe option to those book a call with your Google Ads expert emails that you find in your inbox just way too often. This has been a complaint for a while, like since 2005 and we covered it many times, but in 2022, Google said it will do something about it. Well, in 2026, we now have an unsubscribe link.

Google Ads is testing a new Channel Diagnostics feature for Performance Max campaigns within "Channel Performance" under the "Insights & Reports" section. This shows you the diagnostic data of all the channels together and of a specific channel in particular, all in one place.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google improved the recipe results in AI Mode, to make them more clickable...

Recipe bloggers really have Google's ear, as Google has made yet another official change to its AI Mode recipe results. Google's Robby Stein announced on X the launch of "a new visual treatment making it even easier to discover and visit recipe pages with AI Mode." He added there are now "prominent links at the top of responses with useful details and images '" like the creator name, recipe ratings and number of ingredients."

Google AI Overviews can show the contents of the markdown files of web pages directly in the snippets within those AI Overviews. Google's John Mueller called this "unexpected" and that this does not mean Google treats markdown files any differently than any other content page.